Movie Criticism: Samurai Rebellion

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Samurai Rebellion is the way Toshiro Mifune defies our expectations as the 18th century samurai Isaburo Sasahara. The opening shot is typical enough: Isaburo stands with sword in hand, his stance firm, his face masked in determination. There is no movement and yet he is exploding with energy. This is classic Toshiro Mifune. He steps forwards and, in one fell swoop, slices his opponent in half. A dummy made of straw falls to the ground. He is testing swords.

It turns out that there isn't much use for sword mastery in peacetime. Isaburo, despite all his martial prowess, is a henpecked man. He carries himself in such a way that we barely recognize Mifune at all. There is no brazen stride here; no mocking glean in his eyes. Gone is the bravado. Instead, we are presented with a man who does his best to uphold the honor of his family name and appease his shrieking wife. It's like Clint Eastwood being something other than Clint Eastwood, like a planet without gravity. From the start, we sense this energy in Isaburo and then watch as it is crammed down by etiquette, societal expectations, and the wills of other people. When this energy is finally loosed and the transformation takes place, it's electrifying to hear Isaburo declare: “For the first time in my life I feel alive!”

Yet this transformation would be nothing if not for its gradual progression. Director Masaki Kobayashi, much like Neil Blomkamp in District 9, understood the importance of crafting a strong human drama to wrap his action scenes around. For the first hour and a half of its two hour run time, there is not a single action scene in the entire film. Instead, the audience is invested in the emotions of a family attempting to resist the machinations of a greedy lord. Bluff meets counter bluff as the family attempts to win a political game that is clearly stacked against them. Yet, Samurai Rebellion surpasses District 9 on two accounts: while both films take time to skillfully build to their climatic finales, District 9 throws it all away on idiotic heroics and video game tropes while Samurai Rebellion only continues to escalate the stakes right up to its final moments. Furthermore, Samurai Rebellion's finale remains firmly planted in its gritty realism while District 9 floats off into comic book land, cheapening much that preceded it.

Nonetheless, we would be all too fortunate to have more films like District 9 today. Too often, modern action filmmakers are obsessed with carrying us from one set piece to the next. A battle in a laboratory, a chase down the highway, a fist fight in a factory, a warzone in the jungle, and on and on. Since no time is given to develop characters and thereby heighten the dramatic stakes, the audience becomes increasingly deadened to the growing extravagance of Hollywood special effects. It's gotten so bad that they've introduced 3D all over again, because fifty foot tall fighting robots weren't enough the first time around. I feel frustrated with the directors of modern day blockbusters and often wonder, as I did in Terminator Salvation, why they don't get the hell out of my way and just hand me an Xbox 360 controller. If we're just going to mindlessly blow things up, give me the detonator.

The main difference between your modern action blockbuster and Samurai Rebellion is this: no amount of CGI wizardry can match the intensity and emotion of Isaburo's final battle. While computerized explosions and physics defying kung fu may wow us on the first go, we become dulled to their effect. Human emotion, however, is a ceaseless complex tapestry that no amount of polygons will ever be able to match.

Take, for instance, Isaburo's close friend Tatewaki, the only man that can match his skill with a blade. Time and again, Tatewaki prods Isaburo to continue in his struggle. Does he have Isaburo's best interest in mind or is he playing politics, attempting to concoct a situation he can take advantage of? We can't be sure. There is a moment near the end of the film, when a close up on Tatewaki's face suggests a nearly infinite range of emotions and, at the same time, remains unreadable. It is these moments, when we grapple with the characters, that not only makes cinema worth our time, but enables it to enrich us.

How to know, once and for all, that you are hideous.

The image to the left is a beautiful face. Now, you may not think so just by looking at it, but that series of lines is the exact proportions that, regardless of race or culture, determine whether or not you will be viewed as attractive. I came across it when I was watching a BBC mini-series called The Human Face, starring John Cleese. If you don't know who Cleese is, well, your mother smells of elderberries.

In the episode "Beauty", Cleese interviews Dr. Stephen Marquardt. His website can be found here. Dr. Marquardt is a surgeon who wanted to know what made people beautiful. Eventually his work lead him to create the above image which is based on the Golden Ratio.

The Golden Ratio was pioneered by ancient Greek mathematicians like Pythagoras and Euclids, and has been with us ever since. These whiz kids realized that nature, beauty itself, adhered to a specific patten. That pattern can be expressed as 1:1.618. In the example of the face, the width of the nose at the base is 1 and the width of the mouth, in relation, is 1.618. In turn, the width of the mouth could be the 1 and the length from the mouth to the edge of the cheek could be the 1.618 and so on. When looking at the length of the entire human body, the distance from feet to navel and from navel to forehead will also adhere to this pattern in a well proportioned person. A star or pentagram is beautiful to us because it is composed of intersecting isosceles triangles which correspond to one another and whose individual sides are dictated by the ratio.

I could go on and on about all the places you can find the golden mean in nature and design, but my purpose here today is less academic and far more narcissistic. I wanted to see how I myself stacked up against the mean.

This dashing young gent is yours truly. Ladies, please keep the swooning to a minimum as this is a very serious matter of science.

Using the free image manipulation program Gimp, I turned the Marquadt face into a transparency and laid it on top of mine. Notably, the right side of my face in the image is better proportioned than the left. Having suffered from a lazy eye in my younger years, I find this unsurprising as symmetry is often an indicator of health and proper growth. The lack of symmetry goes some ways towards explaining my eye problems.

On the right side of my face, the eye aligns well while my cheekbone and jawline contour to the appropriate lines. The lips also adhere well to their lines as does the nose, though it is a bit large.

Now this is better. By copying and flipping the right side of my face, we can create a more balanced look. What is interesting here is that even if my face were properly balanced, there are still some issues. We can now see even more clearly that the nose is spilling outside of its lines and that the eyes are not wide enough. Additionally, the eyebrows are too low on the face and give off, along with the eyes, a "closed-off" appearance and may even signal aggression.

Perhaps this explains why people always ask me "Are you having a good time" or say "You don't look like you had much fun." I was having fun until you reminded me that I look like the bastard child of Eeyore the Donkey and Ebenezer Scrooge, you fuck.

Ahem. If you would like to try this for yourself, you can download Gimp here and the line version of the face here.

Create two layers in gimp, both with transparency. Place your face on the bottom layer and the line face on the top layer, then resize your face until the lips and jawline match up. And then, hey presto: mathematical proof that no one will ever love you.

P. S. For you nerds out there, be sure to check out fractals and the fibonacci sequence to learn more about the fascinating patterns that lie just beneath the veil of the cosmos.

They say the Sign to Hell reads, "Be of Good Cheer"

Hello, friend. I'd like you to join me in a meditation on the universe. Come along and contemplate how the ley lines of the cosmos could be so hideously contorted as to result in the aside image. Feel free to click on it, peruse it, soak it in. Bathe in its sumptuous vagaries. It's a translation of Dante's inferno, untampered, with a version of Dante on the cover who does not appear anywhere within the following pages. In fact, he comes from this video game adaptation which could be said to stray ever so slightly from the source material. And by stray, I mean that you fight man-eating dicks and vaginas with a scythe that you stole from Death itself because you KILLED HIM.

Nonetheless, Del Ray publishing requires a hearty salute. I haven't seen this much chutzpah in the promotion of a literary classic since Bantam Spectra placed Will Smith on the cover of I, Robot and boldly declared, "One man saw it coming":



Too bad he wasn't in the book. Of course, neither was the plot of the movie, but that's a small quibble.

But to fully get a sense for the kind of visionary thinking that has gone into the Del Ray edition of Dante's inferno, which includes an introduction by Dante's Inferno Executive Producer Jonathon Knight and a 16 page full color art insert, I may need to put this whole thing another way. Let me get my freak on and recontextualize this shit for you.

Try to imagine how this:


"il Sommo Poeta" Dante Alighieri

Becomes this:


"Sows and Mows" Dante

Followed by the precise and painstakingly crafted translation work of this man:


19th century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Turning into a video game that runs a marketing campaign like this:


Leading to an “animated epic” like this:



Giving us immortal lines of poetry like this:

"You're gonna love it. We've got bodies flying around. We've got Dante literally being shoved up a monster's butt." - Director Vic Cook

And this:

"In the original game script we wrote that Cerberus was going to shove Dante up his ass...it was a crazy, crazy scene. We just couldn't do it in the game for a lot of reasons. To have that moment that was in the game script that was cut from the game to show up in the animated feature is just really cool." - Executive Producer Jonathon Knight

Which makes me feel like this:

Drugs, Money, and Theme Parks

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I think vegetarians who pontificate about animals being equal to humans while stuffing their face with tofu meat is superbly odd, like a man denouncing cannibalism while eating hufu (human tofu, for the unaware.) Not wrong, not immoral, just very, very odd.

Actually, I've never said any of that before, but I have said that one of the great things about living in Orlando is the proximity to theme parks and I could have started off talking about that, but I thought, "Cannibalism doesn't get enough air time." I mean, sure, it's a big taboo in our society, but hey, have you ever really thought about it? As a lifestyle choice? No? Oh well.

In addition to theme parks, I'll also say this: It pays to have financially affluent friends who can get you express passes at Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios. In fact, in this time of great economic recession, I would highly recommend getting palsy-walsy with every rich person you can find. Who knows, maybe you'll luck out and get to live life the Entourage way, riding on the coattails of another man's (or woman's) success. This may be seen as underhanded or even manipulative, but it's really quite the opposite. You see, rich people expect to buy their friends; that's why they became rich in the first place.

So, with The Dark Knight freshly snubbed for Best Picture at the Oscars, no peace in the Middle East, and the economy spiraling into ever greater distress, I took a trip downtown and spent a night at the Royal Pacific Resort before embarking on my Universal Adventure.

The Royal Pacific, as the name may suggest, has a strange quasi-Hawaiian/quasi-Caribbean thing going on. I say thing because it's not really a vibe or a jive, and it's definitely not a funk. The tropic flavor found in the thatched roofing and lamps carved out of wood was often countered by large white pillars or bland-but-pricey furniture. In general, it felt like someone took a rich man's house and decided that it needed an extra thousand or so rooms. I will nonetheless praise the Royal Pacific Resort for the air conditioner in my room, which was capable of flash freezing a star on the verge of going supernova.

If you have not been to Islands of Adventure in a while, you'll be happy to know that it is much the same. The entrance still says "The Adventure Begins" and the exit still says "The Adventure continues ..." which creates a bit of a continuity error for returning guests. The only way it makes sense is this: Somewhere out in the real world, the adventure dies. Upon perceiving this, I was inconsolably depressed for all of five seconds.

As for the park: The Hulk is still a great roller coaster, the line for Doctor Doom is still too long, and there are still people wandering about Seuss Landing in a drug-induced haze. I must report, however, that the Ministry of Magic had closed down a good portion of the Lost Continent so that a certain boy wizard with a funny scarf and a scar on his forehead could set up shop.

While I am no fan of Harry Potter (and I pray that the Dueling Dragons will not become the Dueling Broomsticks for reasons as obvious as they are obscene), I can't help but commend the park's decision. After all, the Lost Continent was always the odd man out, surrounded by big name franchises like Jurassic Park and Marvel Super Hero Island. It was disconcerting to pass by familiar characters like Wolverine, Popeye, and the little DNA sequence guy from the first JP movie, only to show up in Random Fantasy Land, which was kind of Tolkien-esque but also kind of Arabian with a bit of Ancient Greek stylings dashed in for flavor.

Here's a fun thought: At least once, a mentally adrift Seuss Landing denizen has taken a left turn and found himself paralyzed with fear, locked in a deathgaze with that one gryphon statue (you know the one I'm taking about) at the entrance to the Lost Contienent. Careful though, don't think for a moment that our little Seusser's fear wasn't justified. You have to realize that, for the gryphon, it doesn't count as cannibalism.

Modest Mouse at the Hard Rock

The Hard Rock Live was filled with the wail of air-raid sirens as Isaac Brock, lead singer of Modest Mouse, took the stage in an eruption of yelps and howls on Tuesday, June 24.

If you haven't seen Brock in concert, you need only imagine a deranged lumberjack playing banjo, with Ol' Scratch himself running hell's band behind him, to approximate the experience. Now imagine that this unholy marriage of rock and the rustic wasn't horrifyingly awful.

The songs played from albums ranging from 1996's This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About all the way up to the most recent We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank - which went gold in June - were walls of sound filled with enough energy and power to split the amps in half and cause every tooth in the house to simultaneously abscess.

Even lackluster studio tracks like "Fire It Up" were given a new, well, it was too distorted and sinister to be life, but it was certainly a possession of some form.

A particularly impressive guitar lick was former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr's opening to "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes," which sounded like someone tape-recorded a banshee tearing off a siren's head, played in reverse.

In truth, it was often difficult to tell where songs began or ended in the lengthy two-hour performance as each would blend into one another in squall-like fury and then congeal into a slow plodding pulse before picking up again. Occasionally, the music would stop and Brock would address the audience in a friendly, soft-spoken voice. The contrast between mild man and mad-mannered was worth the price of admission alone.

More impressive than the song selection was the number of instruments employed in the performance. Stage hands scurried back and forth as they handed Brock and Marr new guitars for each song, while the bass guitarist would switch to cello and trumpet and who knows what else.

Somewhere between the tiny piano, two drum sets and the banjos, I lost track of who was playing what and when. Mostly, I was just amazed that they were still bringing out new guitars even toward the end. Inventors take note: if you build these guys some kind of robotic guitar dispensing device, you'll make a fortune and they'll save a fortune in stage hands.

The only blemishes on the performance were recurring technical problems. While discordance and feedback are to be expected of Modest Mouse (in fact, it is regarded as part of their signature sound), 20 seconds of ear-piercing feedback doesn't count as music unless you are Lou Reed or the Mars Volta.

The performance reached its climax as Brock dropped to his knees and began screaming into his guitar with the noise rising up behind him like flaming souls from hell itself. Sure, there was an encore after that, but there wasn't much left that they could do to top it.

As the audience began funneling out, a man near the exit remarked, "You know, I liked these guys before, but they're definitely my favorite band now."

I doubt he was alone in this sentiment.

A match made in Weirdsville

Crossovers always sound like a good idea on paper. You take two popular franchises, smash them together and, hey presto, entertainment is born. Or not. At the movies, crossovers have been about as successful as videogame flicks. There’s something seriously wrong with a genre when Mortal Kombat stands as its cinematic apex. As for crossovers, one would assume that Aliens and Predators going at it would be nothing short of violent, mind-throttling splendor. AvP and its sequel have proven otherwise. Similarly, Freddy vs. Jason taught us that two psychopathic, supernaturally-powered mass murderers can, in fact, make for boring company.

It would seem that crossovers are forever destined to flourish only within the realm of video games and comic books. With this in mind, we can begin to make sense of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, a fighting game due out for PS3 and Xbox 360 on November 16.

To be fair, crossovers have generally fared better in video games. The Marvel vs. Capcom series saw the likes of Wolverine, Spiderman, and Iron Man going up against Ryu, Chun-Li, and Megaman, much to fans’ delight. Super Smash Brothers Brawl saw video game titans Mario and Sonic going toe to toe, with a little Solid Snake thrown in for kicks. The recently released Soul Calibur 4 had Darth Vader on PS3 and Yoda for the Xbox360. As of October 23, gamers will be able to purchase the Star Wars character that didn’t come with their game as downloadable content. The force will be with you for about five dollars.

Still, MK vs DC can’t help but seem like a bit of an oddity. For instance, while it’s possible that Ryu could hold his own against Wolverine, it’s hard to fathom how Superman wouldn’t be able to knock a ninja’s head clean off in one punch. I love Sub-zero, but he’s essentially Mr. Freeze with Kung Fu moves. I know this will cause mental anguish, but think back to the film Batman and Robin. Arnold Schwarzenegger, equipped with an arsenal of ice-themed puns, had a freezing gun plus an army of henchman hockey players, and he couldn’t even beat a nipple-clad George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell. Why Alicia Silverstone was not nipple-clad remains one of the greater cinematic tragedies of our time. The greatest cinematic tragedy is the very existence of the film.

Furthermore, with Batman as a playable character in the game, it will be possible for a player to select the Dark Knight and then pummel the Man of Steel to death. This is an issue. Do I believe that Batman is a better character than Superman? Yes. Do I believe that Christian Bale could take Brandon Routh in a fight? Yes. Do I believe that Bale is more attractive than Routh? Yes, but let’s not linger on that for fear of impugning our masculinity. All I’m saying is that it would seem a little more appropriate if Superman had a one button move where he could, at any given time in the match, hurtle his opponent into the sun. All I’m asking for is a little accuracy.

This raises another issue: Fatalities. Mortal Kombat has never been hailed as a particularly deep or complex fighting series. It’s draw and claim to fame has always been the visceral pleasure of dismembering your opponent after beating him into submission. As such, Fatalities will remain for Mortal Kombat characters and DC villains while DC heroes will merely have Brutalities.

Fatalities, as the name would indicate, involve killing your opponent. The Joker will shoot people in the face and Scorpion will probably light people on fire. The Brutalities will consist of nothing more than a non-fatal beat down, which is a grand shame and a bit hypocritical. Why would you try to keep your characters family friendly in a game renowned for being anything but? Did Capcom refuse to pick up DC’s calls? Besides, I’ve always wanted to throw Liu Kang into the sun. One less crappy Bruce Lee rip-off in the world could only be regarded as a good thing.

Obama's Victory and the Internet

The internet age is a strange thing. The old cliché is that the web is an information superhighway, a place where you pick and choose your content like you pick and choose a rest stop. The truth is that most content these days is user created, which means the choice becomes everyone’s and no one’s.

Even if you were one of the few people who was trying to escape all the election hubbub by playing an online game or surfing your favorite website, chances are that you were getting up to the minute information anyway. This superhighway looks suspiciously like whitewater rapids to me.

Still, it’s entertaining to watch the internet react to history in the making. For some reason, everyone on Facebook got on the same wavelength and felt compelled to express their feelings about the election results in a pithy line on their status bar.

Some celebrated that they wouldn’t have to move to Europe or Canada, while others expressed an intention to start packing their bags. Some encouraged us to enjoy our “new socialist regime” while others sought to remind us that only Ron Paul “could have saved this country”. Some were overcome with a fervent fear and said that they would “spend the night in prayer”. A lot of them just said “Yay! Obama!! <3” and a few expressed amusement as they watched everyone else panic and jubilate. One republican responded with a simple ellipse, “…”. How mysterious.

It makes me wish Facebook had existed during the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Fall of the Berlin Wall. How we managed to get through these events without the witty and insightful commentary of college students is truly boggling. You can’t really know how depressing the Great Depression is until you see a status feed which reads “OMG this sucks :( ”.

The internet allowed people to notice this status feed trend and start commenting on it, as it was in progress, on forums. Entire thread pages were dedicated to humorous Facebook reactions from both sides. Inevitability, these threads would then devolve into a political mudslinging contest. No surprise there.

The mudslinging, without fail, would invoke Godwin’s law, which states that sooner or later somebody will bring up the Nazis, by comparing either Obama or McCain to Hitler. This, in turn, would immediately invoke Dodds Collary, which states that whoever brings up Nazis automatically loses the debate. Often times, the Hitler reference came straight from a Facebook status, nullifying everyone’s argument before anyone said anything.

Even online gamers couldn’t escape the politics. In the World of Warcraft, Night Elves and Dwarves fiercely debated with one another. Some of the Elves preferred Obama, citing his environmentally friendly policies. Many of the Dwarves backed McCain, stating that they needed a strong military to fight off the Orcs. But, while his old age was seen as a detriment to many voters, the Undead found McCain too young for their liking and the Trolls wondered whether or not Obama could properly handle the illegal immigrant issue. Several gnomes supported Ron Paul based on appearance alone.

Each town was filled with play-by-play commentary by the denizens of Azeroth, as they watched CNN and shopped for gear at the Auction House. Much like the forums, conversations would quickly and often dissolve into chaos as wizards and warlocks threw verbal fireballs at one another from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

Obama’s victory was known throughout the continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, the very moment it happened. Even if you traveled out to the farthest forest or the highest mountain, it was guaranteed that you’d get a message from a friend saying: “Obama won! : P ”. It’s almost like you’d have to wander out into a real forest to get away from it all.